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by Anonymous



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27914950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: But yeah, it gets you to thinking. The blue absorbs sadness pretty damn well - you've taken to sleeping with spares on the pillow, just in case - but maybe it's working too well. Didn't you always used to be angry?Ah, well. You always used to be miserable, too. Maybe they're more interlinked than you thought.---Solitude affects Tommy, more than he had thought it even could.
Relationships: Dave | Technoblade & TommyInnit, Sam | Awesamdude & TommyInnit, Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, TommyInnit & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 13
Kudos: 427
Collections: Anonymous





	home

Ghostbur is not a good therapist. You come to this conclusion about a week into your exile, when you tell him a funny story about the time you accidentally on purpose dropped his guitar out of your bedroom window. He looks at you adoringly and asks whose guitar it was and you excuse yourself to hit things with your shoddy new sword.

So no, he is not the comfort he could be. In all fairness, neither was the man Wilbur became. Especially near the end, he was snappy and cold and dismissive of all but the most physically salient problems. It was almost better than this, the silence, the glares, the judgment. Almost.

You miss the Church. You make a place to pray, a rough hunk of wood that reminds you of making benches a million years ago, and you wonder if Prime cares anymore. You wonder if he ever did. Sometimes, you wonder if he's even-

"Morning!" sings Ghostbur. "You look a little put out. Would you like some blue again?"

You don't know where he gets that shit and you're not sure you want to. But you accept the cool clear glob of whatever the fuck, lie in the wet grass, watch colour seep into it. It works. There's something satisfying in the slow bleed of colour, perversely, so you sit inside and watch the Polaroid through the blue until it's all the same uniform shade and you can't see anything at all.

After a while the pile of blue is getting bigger than you remember. You're not sad, and you're grateful for that, but you're certainly not fucking happy. People come to gloat at your failures and wish you well with Logsted and none of them ever, ever acknowledge Ghostbur. As you must, you latch onto cold comfort in whatever you can in the conversation and they leave feeling, you're sure, overwhelmed and contemptuous.

Sometimes Techno comes to laugh at you. Sometimes Phil stands behind him and looks away. Tubbo does not visit, and Ghostbur is hardly his alive counterpart. But when there are three-and-a-bit out of the five of you standing in the snow, varying degrees of miserable, you begin to think about happiness without a nation to bolster it. And you begin to want, so desperately, to go home.

It's the first time in a long time that home hasn't meant L'Manberg.

You have never been the kind of person to need help. When you were younger - and you are so very young - you used to see it as a moral failing, as an admittance of something missing or broken. You don't quite know where this came from. You had a kind father, two well-meaning if standoffish brothers separated from you only by age, and you had Tubbo. It doesn't make sense. But the mantra sneaks back in anyway that to need help is to be weak, and to be weak is to be beaten down. You are the kind of person to be beaten down. Until recently, you have been the kind of person to stand back up.

One day you roll out of bed into the neatly stacked hoard of used blue and you're not sad about it, per se, but there's a tingle of irritation low in your stomach before Ghostbur appears to check out the noise. You clean up together, and he whistles the anthem whilst he works, and you remember that looking at him hurts your eyes. That's definitely the reason you don't do it anymore.

The breadth of Logstedshire never encompasses anything beyond an outpost and a campsite. You think that might be for the best. Of course Ghostbur makes elaborate plans, but that's all part of the fun for him - nobody ever lives in his fancy tents, and he tears them down cheerfully before replacing them with something new. You watch him work and you go through the motions of subsistence farming and you sit by the log in prayer and you cry and you cry and you cry and you begin asking him for blue before he can offer it.

It's not his fault. When you start sobbing, when you start yelling at him, he goes all blank and fuzzy like a child's drawing and forgets it all as it happens. So you do it less, and he is the happiest man not alive.

You're not stupid, is the thing. Blue isn't like strength potions or speed potions or even alcohol - you checked weeks ago, and yes, you can hold as much of it as you want without succumbing to it the way Schlatt did to his greater poisons. No, the real allure is that when you don't ask for it, Ghostbur offers, and you know he is being kind.

But something Sam says on one of his visits sticks with you, the sentiment unpleasant and viscous despite his amiable nature.

"You don't look angry anymore," he says gently as you pass him a bundle of carrots. In return, there'll be much more than they're worth. You always pretend not to notice the Badlands' generosity and they always pretend not to notice the holes in your shirt. It's a fun little unspoken agreement you all dance around.

(The rips you could fix easily, but you won't. For some reason, a reason that eludes you, you are suddenly as wary of casual death as of the real kind. You used to let people throw you over cliffs. For fun. Small wonder you were so sad, back then.)

But yeah, it gets you to thinking. The blue absorbs sadness pretty damn well - you've taken to sleeping with spares on the pillow, just in case - but maybe it's working too well. Didn't you always used to be angry?

Ah, well. You always used to be miserable, too. Maybe they're more interlinked than you thought.

You stop messaging Tubbo.

He still hasn't visited.

You stop asking for blue.

It's still offered.

You stop patching the holes in your shirt.

They're still darned.

You think you know why Ghostbur is the way he is, now. How else could he bear to exist?

You haven't argued with your father in a very long time. For one, you don't even have that kind of relationship - he calls you Tommy, and you call him Phil, and when your brothers and Tubbo all left to pursue music and bloodlust and bees you like to think you became more akin to friends. For two, you haven't exchanged more than greetings with him since the day you realised the discs no longer matter. Oh, and you got exiled. That too.

He yells, which you are unused to, and he raises his hand to his mouth in self-directed horror as you flatten yourself to the logs and Ghostbur wrings his hands nauseatingly through themselves. When his voice softens, what he says is that you need to stop taking blue. 

"You're not some kind of fuckin' ghost, you don't know what it'll do to you," he adds tiredly, and you say there's no need to swear about it, and he looks at you like - hah! - like he's seen a ghost.

He asks what happened to your shirt and you say it got dirty, which is true. He asks why you haven't cleaned it and you say that you have not cleaned your clothes in years; it's easier to just die and wake up remade, and you don't die anymore.

Phil chews his lip and takes Ghostbur aside for a word and leaves with the barrel of blue strapped to his poor unusable wings. That's alright; you haven't been sad for forever. And there will always be more.

The morning Phil comes back, alone again, laden with winter clothes and hot soup and journals for Ghostbur, you have been crying for three days.


End file.
